The German actor Klaus Kinski (1926-1991) is best known today for a clutch of films he made with Wernor Herzog including ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’, ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo’. All are utterly engrossing and feature grandstanding performances from Kinski. The actor was also known for his erratic personal life that often featured violent outbursts (Herzog described him as “a monster and a great pestilence.”) More troublingly, some years after his death, one of his children, Pola Kinski, claimed that he had sexually abused her. Benjamin Myers’ new book concerns an infamous and antagonistic one-man show that Kinski gave in Berlin in 1971 about Jesus Christ. (The book is billed as: “A novel, about a film, about a performance, about Jesus.”) In a bravura conceit, Myers attempts to put the reader inside the mind of Kinski, the narrative unfolding – or, more pertinently, collapsing – in the second person. (Kinski refers to himself in the third person throughout, as befits his elephantine ego.) These sections have a messianic intensity, Kinski coming over like a cross between Hitler and Iggy Pop. This ‘performance’ is interspersed with sections that take place fifty years into the future, detailing the writer’s struggle with moulding the material (i.e. a YouTube film of the 1971 show, along with sundry books on Kinski) into a new piece of art. Benjamin Myers is one of the UK’s finest authors, his restless mind never settling on one style or genre, and his latest – a fairly short work, which I read in one sitting – asks questions about the creative process and “the art” vs the artist. RM

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